His Time to Kill
It took only three years for a good ol’ boy from Uvalde to become Hollywood’s hottest leading man? Even Matthew McConaughey can’t believe it.
(Page 3 of 3)
ASK MOST SHOW BUSINESS PEOPLE these days who their movie heroes are and you’ll get a Quentin Tarantino—like laundry list of old-time matinee idols, suitably obscure auteurs, and action directors. But not Matthew McConaughey—besides Paul Newman, his only other cinematic hero is noted thespian Lou Ferrigno. “The Incredible Hulk, yeah,” he says, grinning. “He turned into the Hulk twice a show, and he’d always throw those big air tanks.”
Entertainment wasn’t on the agenda in McConaughey’s working-class family. “We weren’t allowed to watch much TV,” he says. “The rule was, if there was daylight, you were outside, building tree houses, frog gigging, riding bike trails, stuff like that. At night, okay, an hour of TV, then let’s play a board game.” McConaughey was the youngest of three children, and he was also an accident: Unable to conceive a second child, his parents had adopted a son, Pat, as a tenth birthday present for their eldest, Rooster (Mike on his birth certificate). Six years later, Matthew came along.
His father, “Big Jim” McConaughey, was, in his son’s words, “a coonass from Louisiana.” He spent a year with the Green Bay Packers after playing college ball at the University of Houston and (for one year) at Kentucky for Bear Bryant. Big Jim ran a Texaco station in Uvalde, but in 1980—boom time—he moved the family to Longview and went into the pipe business. McConaughey’s mother, Kay, was a Trenton, New Jersey-born schoolteacher, and in the course of 39 years she and Big Jim were twice divorced and twice remarried (Big Jim died in 1992). Nevertheless, it was a fairly religious, no-nonsense family with a few simple rules: no lying, no back talk, and, McConaughey remembers, “You could never say ‘I can’t.’”
At UT he was going to get a liberal arts education and then he was going to law school. “The family always said, ‘Yeah, you need to become a lawyer and then come and get us all out of trouble,’” he says. “But it wasn’t tickling my gut. I wasn’t waking up every day thinking, ‘Man, I can’t wait to get to law school.’”
An epiphany was just around the corner. Well, lying on the coffee table at a friend’s house, actually. McConaughey, who says he never read a book cover-to-cover until college, was killing time before his sophomore final exams when he spotted the paperback that changed his life: The Greatest Salesman in the World, a multimillion-selling tome by Og Mandino, who was a sort of Dale Carnegie-M. Scott Peck figure in the sixties and seventies.
“My first reaction was, ‘That’s a really aggressive, corporate-capitalistic title,’” McConaughey says, “but it was philosophy, it was self-improvement, and it was very, very practical.” (Among the book’s mantras: “I will laugh at the world” and “I will act now.”) McConaughey keeps multiple copies around the house for himself and for anyone else he encounters, including journalists. He was struck by “the fact that I had found it, that it found me, it wasn’t a book that somebody said, ‘You must read this.’ The next day I ripped up my fall schedule and decided I wanted to tell stories.”
A TIME TO KILL AND LONE STAR are not the only movies McConaughey appears in this year. Before either of those films began shooting, he landed a small part in Larger Than Life, a man-meets-elephant comedy starring Bill Murray. During the post-Boys on the Side downtime, McConaughey auditioned for the part of Tip Tucker, an obnoxious, pill-popping trucker who picks up Murray and the elephant hitchhiking. “I went and got this ugly green stretch-material jersey, stuffed it, pulled my American flag cap on all bowed over, put a big ol’ dip in, and just had fun,” he says. He had to tone it down, though, after Murray made a crack about the movie’s needing subtitles.
That was then. Now McConaughey is a commodity, and new scenes are being added to Larger Than Life. It’s eight days after the Sunday beach party, and this morning a driver came at five o’clock to take McConaughey to the location. In makeup, one of the film’s producers, John Watson, comes to pay his respects. Watson mentions the dramatic justification for the new scenes: Late in the film, the “conflict” between Murray’s character and the elephant has been “resolved” (i.e., Bill has gotten over his irritation with the unwieldy creature and learned to love it), so the return of Matthew’s angry trucker gives the story a shot in the arm. Plus, the producer says “the cards” were through the roof, the preview audience loudly declaring that Tip Tucker’s eight minutes were the best part of the movie. Throw in the equally overwhelming results of A Time to Kill’s test screenings, and the new scenes and delay in opening Larger Than Life until after McConaughey’s starring debut make sense.
McConaughey is glad to be working and pleased that he’ll be seen in this comic role after his more serious work in A Time to Kill. He doesn’t want to be pigeonholed; he wants to move between genres, to be a leading man and also do character parts. “There’s two kinds of actors,” he says. “Some actors have a certain characteristic. You just like ’em, they’re movie stars, and you always know it’s them. Then there’s someone like Gary Oldman or Sean Penn, who can completely humble himself. They erase everything to become a certain character. I’d like to incorporate both.”
Exactly what movie McConaughey might do that in is the question—one that’s very much on his mind as he works on Larger Than Life. In between quick takes and little actorly adjustments—“Did my ass stick out enough?” he asks the director, who assures him that it did—McConaughey is on his cell phone, checking with Gus for a career update. “In the next hour,” he says, “the year could be entirely planned. Or it could take another four months.” Well, it took more than an hour but less than four months: By June, McConaughey’s future was mapped. Because he has a two-picture option with Warner Bros. as part of his deal for A Time to Kill, he had to pass on a remake of The Day of the Jackal as well as the sequel to Speed. Another project, the Texas bank robber saga The Newton Boys, from Texas screenwriters Claude Stanush and Clark Lee Walker and writer-director Linklater, has been back-burnered but remains a likely prospect.
The movie he will make for Warner Bros. couldn’t be more ideal. McConaughey will yield the top of the marquee to Jodie Foster in Contact (he’s being paid a reported $4 million), a sci-fi action epic that will be the first post-Forrest Gump effort from director Robert Zemeckis. As with A Time to Kill, McConaughey shares the heat with a high-level female star and with a director who has been responsible for some of Hollywood’s grandest (and highest-grossing) commercial entertainments—not just Gump, but also Who Framed Roger Rabbit and the Back to the Future and Romancing the Stone series. There’s even talk of Paul Newman’s joining the cast in a supporting role. Naturally, McConaughey says he’d rather be the first Matthew McConaughey than the next Paul Newman, but he probably didn’t foresee the day when he could be billed above his blue-eyed idol, either.
My Library
